Desert Hearts Read Free Page A

were doing something to her. Her skirts were up and at first she screamed, “No, no” as each man got on top of her and did whatever he was doing to her. Then one of the others came over and shot her through the head. “That’ll shut her up,” he said.
    Mama lay there staring up at the sky, her skirts around her waist, her most private parts exposed. Elizabeth Jane slid a few feet back down the hill and lay there trembling and nauseous. If they came for water, they would see her and tie her to a mule. Or maybe, since she was almost a woman, they would do to her what they had done to Mama.
    She heard them going through the pots and pans and tins in the wagon. Looking for jewelry and money, she guessed. She heard one cursing, “Goddamn pins and needles,” and pictured him opening Mama’s sewing box. That seemed more of a violation than anything. With her eyes closed, she could see the small rosewood box, silk threads carefully laid out, pins in the small blue velvet pin cushion and needles in the oblong tin needle case.
    She lay still for a long time. She had to relieve herself very badly, but couldn’t even squirm to distract herself. Finally she had to let go and could feel her legs go warm with her own water, and then cold.
    Even after she heard them leave, she lay there. What if one of them had stayed behind and was watching? Finally she had to get up. It was getting dark, but at least the moon would be full in a day or so, and as it rose, it gave her enough light to make her way to the wagon.
    She didn’t look at her father or mother. Instead, she crawled into the ransacked wagon and pulled a quilt around her. She couldn’t stop shaking for hours, and slept only fitfully in the last hours before dawn. When she awoke, she was disoriented. She could smell coffee as usual, but it was close and strong, not wafting in from the campfire where Mama was cooking breakfast. Then she realized the smell was coming from the bed of the wagon, where coffee, sugar, and beans were all spilled together.
    “Mama, Papa,” she whispered, and climbed down.
    It was a beautiful morning. Cool, as it always was before the sun was fully up, and the greens of the sage and grass and cottonwoods by the creek were lit from the inside by the clear light of morning. Everything shone pure. It was like waking up to the first morning of the world.
    Until she looked over at her father. The rose on his chest was no longer crimson, but brown and black. Both her parents’ eyes were open, and that was wrong. Elizabeth Jane knew someone should smooth their eyes closed. She looked around, as if to ask for help, but of course she was the only someone there. She walked to her father first and drew her hand over his eyes. When she turned to her mother, she realized Helen Rush’s thighs were smeared with reddish brown blood and Elizabeth Jane pulled her mother’s skirts down quickly before she brushed gently at her face.
    Then she stood there and let the sun come up. What else could she do? She tried to stop it. She closed her eyes and willed it to stay low in the sky, willed time to stop. The sun had no business rising and bathing everything in its clear light. The sun had no right to make such a morning. How could it rise on such horror?
    She was very thirsty and she stumbled down the hill to the creek, picking up the wooden bucket from the bank. What if Mama had given in to her? Would Jonathan be alive? And she tied to the back of a mule? She splashed water on her face and on her legs, which were sticky from wetting herself, and then climbed up the hill again.
    She had nothing to do. She had nowhere to go. So she just sat against the wagon wheel and watched the sun climb higher in the sky and listened as the flies began to buzz around her parents’ bodies.
    * * * *
    A day later the soldiers found her. It took them a few minutes to get through the buzzing, for the flies seemed to have moved inside her head and were all she could hear.
    “This one’s